This Week in Misogyny is Not Thankful

The Thanksgiving holiday in the US meant that This Week in Misogyny took last week off. Misogyny, however, didn’t do me a favor and kept right on rolling. It’s a world of fun below the cut! (As usual, trigger warnings for just about everything apply.)

Well, this is fucking terrifying. A pregnant Italian woman who was visiting the UK on a work-related trip called the police during a panic attack, then was committed to a mental health ward for five weeks and sedated so that social services could have a C-section performed on her to take the baby away. The child is now 15 months old and they still refuse to return her to her mother (or even to Italy, where the mother resides). Lest we feel superior, it’s not like the same shit doesn’t happen in the US, too.

The ACLU is suing the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on behalf of a woman who was repeatedly denied services at a Catholic hospital while she was miscarrying because doctors were still able to detect a fetal heartbeat.

Fuck you, Rush Limbaugh, for using a rape analogy to talk about filibuster reform. (And for pretty much everything else you ever say, honestly.)

What happens when you file sexual assault charges with your school and the local police and your alleged rapist is Jameis Winston, FSU’s star quarterback and a Heisman contender? Lots of delays, authority figures telling you it’s not worth the hassle, and getting vilified by the public. It also apparently leads to a lot of jokes from fans of opposing teams, but one of them was willing to speak up and tell the others to STFU.

A San Antonio police officer has been arrested on rape charges after allegedly assaulting a 19-year-old woman during a late-night traffic stop.

Roxanne Jones is encouraging mothers to tell their sons to have girls text the word “yes” to indicate their consent before having sex in order to cut down on false rape accusations. Because people are never allowed to change their minds about their willingness to have sex and no one’s ever sent messages from someone else’s phone without their knowledge. It’s not actually proof of anything.

Former New Zealand politician Sir Bob Jones wrote an op-ed in which he said that, “If women MPs are going to cry sexism when on the receiving end then they should stay out of politics because it’s not going to change.” Nice. Heaven forbid men should grow up and stop that shit.

The Google Android version of autocorrect has been programmed not to auto-complete certain words in order to cut down on inadvertently obscene text messages. But banning “uterus” and “lactation,” really? (Obviously you can still use the banned words, it just won’t correct your spelling if you do.)

It’s so nice of Thought Catalog to find a white dude to mansplain that we should all shut up about Barbie because, in his manly opinion, all the studies about young girls and body image issues are just silly feminist whining. Thanks, bros!

And then there’s everyone’s favorite lady misogynist, Suzanne Venker, spouting off gender-essentialist bullshit at Fox News about how women need husbands.

Misogyny in science! (Y’all know how much I love when those overlap.)

• It all started when Joe Hanson made a PBS Digital Studios-funded video (since taken down from YouTube) with puppets of famous scientists sitting down to a dinner together that only included one woman, Marie Curie. Of course, the other puppets didn’t let her talk about her scientific accomplishments the way the men did. The video ended with the Albert Einstein puppet sexually assaulting her. He issued a fauxpology that it was supposed to be a funny depiction of how women aren’t taken seriously in science. You failed, dude.The bright spot in all this is the excellent commentary from the science blogging community.
  • Hannah Waters discusses unpacking privilege in science communication.
  • Janet D. Stemwedel wrote an open letter to men who are afraid of being called out by women. ‘Cause really, the problem is with being told you fucked up, not that you actually fucked up. She also more specifically called out one of the men who came out in support of Hanson.
  • Andrew David Thaler tells allies how they should react when they get called out, with a pretty awesome analogy to being told your fly is down.
• Science blogger Emily Graslie reads her sexist mail. People suck.

Male employees of Archie Comics are suing the company’s female CEO for discrimination for her alleged habit of calling them “Penis” instead of using their names. She denies the charges, and her lawyer says the case is baseless because “white male” isn’t a protected class. I can’t wait to see how this plays out.

Evan Rachel Wood is pissed off that the MPAA required a scene in which a man performed oral sex on a woman to be cut from her new film Charlie Countryman in order to get an R rating instead of NC-17.

Ewwww, football’s become all girly because they wear pink shoes for breast cancer awareness and don’t want to run a gun ad during the Super Bowl. (Eyeroll.gif)

The delayed-flight note-passing incident that went viral on Thanksgiving has since been revealed as a hoax (shocking!), but why were so many people amused by a man telling a woman to eat his dick in the first place?

It sucks that Plan B might not work on some women, but it’s not an excuse to fat-shame women or for PETA to push veganism as a weight-loss panacea.

Evolutionary psychologists are at it again! Two surveys of college students found that women were most likely to say they regretted sexual actions, including losing their virginity to the wrong person, cheating, or getting sexually involved too quickly, whereas men regretted sexual inaction, being too shy to approach women or simply not having enough sexual encounters. Instead of attributing this to modern narratives about how men and women are expected to act sexually (and how they’re expected to say they act), the researchers decided that this was evolution in action! Oh, for fuck’s sake. (Didn’t put this in the science section because I refuse to dignify this tripe as actual science.)

Recommended reading

• The “San Antonio Four” have been released from prison/their parole restrictions after being convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child in 1997 based on not much evidence beyond the fact that they were lesbians. The details of the case are seriously messed up.
• Mother Jones rounds up some of the horrible things that abstinence-only speakers tell teenagers.
• New rules from the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology mean that OB/GYNs are no longer allowed to treat male patients (“with few exceptions,” which I assume is NYTimes dancing around saying they can still treat trans* patients with female genitalia). This sucks because many gynecologists have been trained to treat anal cancer, which affects women and men.
• Did the New York Times sexualize breast cancer when they ran a picture on the front page that showed the top of a woman’s breast including a lumpectomy scar and part of her areola? Maybe, maybe not. It’s telling, though, that everyone is talking about the picture and barely mentioning the story it was illustrating about breast cancer rates and genetic testing in Israel.
• Amanda Hess on why female journalists rarely speak up publicly about the harassment and even assaults they suffer on the job, largely from their colleagues. One who is speaking up, a little bit, is science writer Ann Finkbeiner.
• The New York Film Academy released a great infographic on gender inequality in film.
• Related: The Bechdel Test in charts and graphs. (Admittedly this is from June, but I just saw it.)
• If you can get past the somewhat misleading title, this is actually a really interesting look at how The Hunger Games‘s Peeta fits many of the stereotypes movies generally assign to girlfriend characters.
• Why audiences hate female characters, at io9.
• Role/Reboot on how we teach our kids that women are liars.
• This is hilarious: New York Magazine put together a slideshow of stock photos that purportedly represent feminism.